Vindication

by Lyndall Gordon

  He saw this as a ‘disinterested’ sacrifice for his country. Once he had a fortune on the go, he followed a wish to rise into public office out of the murk of commerce. This he did by way of Algiers, writing grandly of ‘the interest of the United States’. All the same, he was shifting cargoes of his own in the Mediterranean, and it was convenient to have his country pay eighty-three thousand dollars a year to the Pasha of Tripoli for US merchant ships to be protected from the pirates of Algiers. This treaty Barlow secured in 1796. A darker deed was to deliver arms–two thousand bombshells and a thousand quintals of gunpowder–to the unprincipled bully of a Dey. Thanks to Barlow, US trade was to flourish on the backs of subject peoples. In one letter to the Secretary of State, he was shameless enough to quote a common saying in the Levant that ‘no honest man goes to Algiers’. He can quote this with humorous ease because, at this moment, Barlow moves from dark tricks to the good deeds on his mind in his will-letter to Ruth. If he does not die in the epidemic, he will put his fortune to the service of his country and others in need. It’s the standard sequel to sordid gains to purify them with charity, and I suspect that Barlow’s recollection of Mary Wollstonecraft at this time in his life–when he draws close to mortality–has to do with his own need for moral gesture.

  Barlow did not die in the foetid summer of 1796. But it was an occasion for trying out a farewell aria to Ruth. ‘I have the wife that my youth has chosen and my advancing age has cherished…from whom all my joys have risen, in whom all my hopes are centred…If you should see me no more, my dearest friend, you will not forget I loved you.’ Even more gracefully, he accepts that another man could take his place.

  It is for the living, not the dead, to be rendered happy by the sweetness of your temper, the purity of your heart, your exalted sentiments, your cultivated spirit, your undivided love. Happy man of your choice! should he know and prize the treasure of such a wife! Oh, treat her tenderly, my dear Sir; she is used to nothing but unbounded love and confidence. She is all that any reasonable man could desire; she is more than I merited, or perhaps you can merit. My resigning her to your charge, though but the result of uncontrollable necessity, is done with a degree of cheerfulness,–a cheerfulness inspired by the hope that her happiness will be the object of your care, and the long continued fruit of your affection.

  Farewell, my wife; and though I am not used to subscribe my letters addressed to you…it seems proper that the last character that this hand shall trace for your perusal should compose the name of your most faithful, most affectionate and most grateful husband,

  Joel Barlow

  Barlow always projects this image of married love, but as we know, his wife, unlike Mary Wollstonecraft, forced herself to condone infidelities. She wondered on one occasion if he had a ‘black sweetheart’. Ruth declined into invalidism, retreating for long spells to spas, while Barlow sent regular, ardent letters–being (like Imlay) too busy to visit the dear sufferer. Once Barlow had a nightmare where he stands at Ruth’s bedside gazing at her wasted form–yet still he does not come. Instead, he offers her his dream. His concern steams off the page. It’s not surprising that Ruth stayed wilting in those heated epistolary arms. Imlay too was a master of assurance: his affirmations left Mary Wollstonecraft sick in mind for a year and a half. Only Godwin helped her.

  What pleased Mary most in Godwin’s letter from Norwich was an announcement that he was coming home, ‘to depart no more’. He was expected on 20 July, and when he did not appear, Mary found herself ‘out of humour’. The following day she left her manuscript (‘as requested’) at his lodgings, together with a note, signed familiarly with her first name. ‘I mean to bottle up my kindness, unless something in your countenance, when I do see you, should make the cork fly out–whether I will or not.’

  As it happened, he wasn’t back. When he did return, on the 24th, he came ready to renew what was turning into something he had not known before. For his placid face and coldness of manner didn’t exclude a lurking responsiveness, keen of eye behind his spectacles. Hazlitt said that Godwin had ‘less of the appearance of a man of genius, than any one who has given such decided and ample proofs of it’. Though he was angular and nearsighted, discerning women were drawn to him. A cosmopolitan beauty, Mrs Reveley, daughter of an architect, an unconventional wanderer who had brought her up on his own in Constantinople, fell in love with Godwin and let him know it. One day at Greenwich in 1795 she and Godwin overstepped the mark. It was Godwin who stopped. He was too responsible to deviate from the laws of society in a way that might injure a wife. Mary, unaware of this particular attraction, could not hide her antagonism to the hovering Mrs Inchbald–‘Mrs Perfection’, as Godwin called her after she suggested amendments to his novel, saying, ‘I have not patience that anything so near perfection should not be perfection.’ Godwin enjoyed his role as her favoured escort.

  ‘I suppose you mean to drink tea with me, one of these day[s],’ Mary grumbled on 2 August. ‘How can you find in your heart to let me pass so many evenings alone…I did not wish to see you this evening, because you have been dining, I suppose, with Mrs Perfection, and comparison[s] are odious.’

  Amelia Alderson was yet another. Mary spent the next evening with her, and was tantalised to hear that Godwin had made overtures to this lovely writer ten years younger than herself. In this case, however, there was no jealousy, for Amelia had turned him off.

  ‘You, I’m told, were ready to devour her–in your little parlor,’ Mary accosted Godwin next day. ‘Elle est très jolie–n’ est[-ce] pas?’

  It was a jolt, yet in a way reassuring. Godwin was not, then, impervious to women. She and Amelia put their heads together over the question of whether he had ever ‘kissed a maiden fair’. Mary asked him to answer only after an hour-long visit from Amelia, intended to try his defences. Could a reserved man of middle age, whose beliefs had distanced him from sexual bonds, change his habits, as in Boccaccio’s tale of Cymon, an uncouth man transformed by love?

  She put this to Godwin. ‘I was making a question yesterday, as I talked to myself, whether Cymons of forty could be informed– Perhaps, after last night’s electrical shock, you can resolve me–.’

  The clear-cut Clarissa voice of her relations with Imlay is no more. A more nuanced voice falls into hiatus, a listening silence or invitation–not to sex in the usual sense, but to some preliminary ‘informed’ state in a wordless space between the sexes. Sentences are incomplete, and silence is a sort of language–the meaning silence of a creature in the process of evolving new modes of communication with a man selected for alertness.

  In order that Godwin might know her more fully, she loaned him Mary; A Fiction, and teased him to discern her secret self. Godwin read it on 3 and 4 August. Could he recognise her as a philosopher in her own cause, in this sense his counterpart? Could he see a woman so near to his eminence? ‘I called on you yesterday, in my way to dinner, not for Mary [the novel]–but to bring Mary–Is it necessary to tell your sapient Philosophership that I mean MYSELF–’

  Two days later, on Saturday 13 August, they discussed their position. ‘It was friendship melting into love’, Godwin said later. ‘When, in the course of things, the disclosure came, there was nothing in a manner for either party to disclose to the other.’ That day there appears to have been some rational agreement to be patient and ‘considerate’ with temperaments so at variance: Mary active and eager; Godwin sedentary and cautious. When they met again the following Monday in Godwin’s lodgings, Mary laid her head on his shoulder. She recreates this scene in her new novel: ‘there was a sacredness in her dignified manner of reclining her glowing face on his shoulder, that powerfully impressed him. Desire was lost in more ineffable emotions…’ Darnford, the lover, feels at this moment that to make Maria happy could be the foremost duty of his life. Maria is scarred by ‘recollected disappointment’. Her fear of outrunning this new affection gives way, now and then, to ‘the playful emotions of a heart just loosened from the frozen bond of grie
f’. All we can say for certain is that this was Mary Wollstonecraft’s version of what seems to have been an emotional exchange. Next morning she sends to ask if Godwin had felt ‘very lonely’ in the night, and invites him to kiss Fanny when she and Marguerite deliver this letter. Mary’s tone is confidently hopeful.

  His reply strikes an unexpected note: mentor and humorist have turned away. He is wary, even prickly. He had been unwell, he claims, and she had mortified him–unintentionally, he concedes. Godwin was clearly not ready as yet to act as lovers, as they tried that Tuesday night, 16 August 1796, recorded in his diary: ‘chez moi’. It went badly wrong.

  Afterwards, Godwin admitted to Mary that during the last few days he had been wrapped up in a private fantasy. ‘I longed inexpressibly to have you in my arms,’ he confessed, but this fantasy had been self-contained. So her offer to stay the night had taken him by surprise. To men who would expect to choose the moment, and particularly to one of Godwin’s biblical training, no respectable woman would take the initiative. Yet reason told him that Mary was more than respectable; desire, in her terms, was ‘pure’, even ‘sacred’. That they could love, yet be so awkward, left them shaken. For once, Mary could not speak. She departed in silence, and sat in Judd Place West, brooding over her breakfast, unable to eat. She even shut the door on Fanny.

  Could she have been responsible for an act against Godwin’s better judgement? He had appeared emotionally withdrawn, unaware of the risk she had taken in trying to make love in the aftermath of Imlay’s desertion. Godwin’s theory of sex could not have been further from her experience: he thought we should be ‘wise enough to consider the sensual intercourse a very trivial object’, and cohabitation a mistake–bound to blunt what feelings there were. Unlike Mary, he was anti-domestic, with the self-protectiveness of the bachelor. All the same, he was not quite as logical in practice as in thought. Logic dictated that if sex were as trivial as he believed, then partners might change with little trouble. In practice there was fidelity in all Godwin’s relationships and, given his respect for women, it would be natural for him to extend fidelity to ‘the sensual intercourse’. There was another discrepancy between theory and actuality: although, theoretically, sex was trivial and marriage out of the question, in actuality Godwin was shaken to find himself in the grip of fantasy, as Mary’s warm cheeks and rounded arms came into focus. He was not a man of impulse; his mind led him, and it worked with a measured deliberation. Mary, who was spontaneous, did not fathom his uneasiness when feelings threatened his control.

  ‘Full of your own feelings, little as I comprehend them, you forgot mine–or do not understand my character,’ she wrote to him that Wednesday morning. What she feared most was to have lost Godwin’s respect: ‘Mortified and humbled, I scarcely know why–still, despising false delicacy I almost fear that I have lost sight of the true. Could a wish have transported me to France or Italy, last night, I should have caught up my Fanny and been off in a twinkle, though convinced it is my mind, not the place, which requires changing. My imagination is for ever betraying me into fresh misery…I am hurt–But I mean not to hurt you. Consider what has passed as a fever of your imagination…’ For her own part, she would follow Rousseau’s Solitary Walker, and take her way through the world alone.

  ‘Do not hate me, Godwin asked. ‘Do not cast me off. Do not become again a solitary walker…You have the feelings of nature, and you have the honesty to avow them.’

  He reproached himself that during the many hours he had longed to hold her in his arms, he had made no move. ‘Why did I not come to you? I am a fool. I feared still that I might be deceiving myself as to your feelings.’ Then, too, he had fantasised a different drama, possibly closer to the conquest he had spoofed in his letter from Norwich: ‘When I make love, it shall be in a storm, as Jupiter made love to Semele, & turned her at once to a cinder.’ His wish to ‘terrify’ was misplaced. Mary looked for tenderness and Godwin was, thankfully, a sensitive man.

  ‘At one point we sympathize,’ he wrote, ‘I had rather at this moment talk to you on paper…I should feel ashamed in seeing you.’

  Shame did not prevent a brilliant answer to sexual failure that turns it around. He reveals his own character; sees into hers; reassures her; lays out the ground for compatibility; and commands her recovery:

  You don’t know how honest I am. I swear to you that I told you nothing but the strict & literal truth, when I described to you the manner in which you set my imagination on fire on Saturday. For six & thirty hours I could think of nothing else…

  Like any other man, I can speak only of what I know. But this I can boldly affirm, that nothing that I have seen in you would in the slightest degree authorise the opinion, that, in despising the false delicacy, you have lost sight of the true. I see nothing in you but what I respect & adore.

  I know the acuteness of your feelings, & there is perhaps nothing upon earth that would give me so pungent a remorse, as to add to your unhappiness.

  Do not hate me. Indeed I do not deserve it. Do not cast me off. Do not become again a solitary walker. Be just to me, & then, though you will discover in me much that is foolish and censurable, yet a woman of your understanding will still regard me with partiality.

  Upon consideration I find in you one fault, & but one. You have the feelings of nature, & you have the honesty to avow them. In all this you do well. I am sure you do. But do not let them tyrannise over you.

  Estimate everything at its just value. It is best that we should be friends in every sense of the word; but in the mean time let us be friends.

  Suffer me to see you. Let us leave every thing else to its own course. My imagination is not dead, I suppose, though it sleeps. But, be it as it will, I will torment you no more. I will be your friend, the friend of your mind, the admirer of your excellencies. All else I commit to the disposition of futurity, glad, if completely happy; passive & silent in this respect, while I am not so.

  Be happy. Resolve to be happy. You deserve to be so. Every thing that interferes with it, is weakness & wandering; & a woman, like you, can, must, shall, shake it off…Call up, with firmness, the energies, which, I am sure, you so eminently possess.

  Send me word that I may call on you in a day or two. Do you not see, while I exhort you to be a philosopher, how painfully acute are my own feelings? I need some soothing, though I cannot ask it from you.

  Godwin left this letter at one o’clock. Mary replied within an hour:

  I like your last–may I call it a love letter?…It has calmed my mind–a mind that had been painfully active all the morning, haunted by old sorrows that seemed to come forward with new force to sharpen the present anguish–Well! well–it is almost gone–I mean all my unreasonable fears–and a whole train of tormentors, which you have routed–I can scarcely describe to you their ugly shapes so quickly do they vanish–and let them go, we will not bring them back by talking of them…

  One word of my ONLY fault–our imaginations have been rather differently employed…My affections have been more exercised than yours, I believe, and my senses are quick, without the aid of fancy–yet tenderness always prevails, which inclines me to be angry with myself, when I do not animate and please those I love.

  Though she finished the letter at two, she sat on it for another hour or two. Meanwhile, at three, Godwin ‘suddenly became awake’ to the mistake he had made in response to her offer: ‘I was altogether stupid & without intelligence as to your plan of staying, which it was morally impossible should not have given life to the dead.’ It was not, he explained, proof of indifference to her, but of thoughts ‘obstinately occupied’ and intent upon ‘an idea I had formed in my own mind of furtive pleasure’. He was struck by the absurdity of his oblivion, and wondered if it was ‘too late to repair it’.

  He was sinking into ‘self-abhorrence’ when Mary suddenly appeared at his door. In response to his ‘Suffer me to see you’, she had come in person to deliver her letter, which closed with an invitation to dine that day
at half past four. It proved now possible to face each other. After she left, Godwin decided to pass on his analysis of their sexual differences because he wanted her to know him for what he was; on the other hand, he wished to secure her calmed state of mind. ‘Take no notice of it for the present,’ he added at the bottom.

  When he arrived to dine, Hays was visiting but left, as she always did, before dinner. Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft dined alone after the day’s exchanges, and parted for the night.

  By the following night, Thursday, they were emboldened to try again, this time at Mary’s lodgings–‘chez elle’, in Godwin’s code–and again, sex was not a success. Godwin was ‘tortured’ by Marguerite’s presence in the next room. He was unused to assignations. What would the nurse make of this? Would she give him away? Mary, for her part, was disconcerted again by the ‘hoar frost’ of Godwin’s reserve–the phrase came to her with a fable she made up the morning after, as she walked with Fanny before breakfast. She pictures herself as a Sycamore tree, denuded of leaves, amongst a cluster of evergreens. The Sycamore envies the foliage that shelters other trees from the blasts of winter. She craves sun, and at every sign, pesters her neighbours to know if spring has come. One day in February, the sun appears and the Sycamore’s sap mounts. She holds out one more day, and the sun darts forth again. Feeling it is spring, the tree’s buds ‘immediately come forth to revel in existence’. But alas, next day ‘a hoar frost…shriveled up [the Sycamore’s] unfolding leaves, changing in a moment the colour of the living green–a brown, melancholy hue succeeded–and the Sycamore drooped, abashed’, for she had mistaken February for April. The fable ends with the dashes common in Mary’s communications to Godwin: ‘whether the buds recovered, and expanded, when the spring actually arrived–The Fable sayeth not–.’